A BURTON school currently placed in special measures by Ofsted is hoping that its application to become an academy will be rubber-stamped within the coming days.

Inspectors reported that Belvedere Junior School in Outwoods Street was inadequate in all areas following an inspection in January. In its first monitoring report since the full inspection, published on June 9, Ofsted noted that the school had since applied for academy status.

The school says that it hopes becoming an academy will provide extra provisions that will see it be removed from special measures monitoring at its next inspection.

The current head teacher Jean Woolner is due to leave the school at the end of the summer term, and said that the inadequate rating re-inforced her decision to leave. However she says she is continuing to work with current staff to ensure that children at the school continue to show signs of improvement.

She told the Mail: “We’ve applied for academy status and hope that this will be rubber-stamped soon.

“We’ve applied to receive sponsorship from Burton and South East Derbyshire Education Trust and hopefully this will allow us to bring the school up to the standard that Ofsted is asking for. However my concern is that they still focus their reports on data gathered, which does not always correlate to the quality of teaching.

Although the report says there are still areas where the school must improve, it is not raising too much concern. She added: “At the end of the inspection they concluded that the plans were fit for purpose and that the school was making good progress.

“Inspectors came in for a monitoring report just 16 days after our inadequate report was published, and I’m not sure what we were meant to have done in that time.”